Marlies Ritter, the Brazilian artist best known for her ceramics, has died.
Often working in series, Ritter made everyday objects uncanny through repetition, not least the doll heads she returned to throughout her career. Often placed on plinths or attached to the oversized bodies of dressmaker’s dummies, her works played with the art historical cherub motif but harboured the strangeness of a death mask. Other ceramics by Ritter were more delicate, the artist casting seed heads from her garden or the inside of sardine tins and other containers found in the kitchen.
Born in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, Ritter studied modelling with Vasco Prado and Xico Stockinger and worked at Stockinger’s Atelier Vila Nova until 1991.
In 2025, Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos staged Ritter’s first retrospective, also featuring her fabric, woodcut and paper works, writing and photography. For the exhibition she produced Untitled (2023–25), an installation of 101 potatoes mimicked in ceramic.
Fernanda Albuquerque, curator of the institutional show Thinking with Your Hands, noted at the time: ‘In Marlies Ritter’s work, hands are affection, memory, and thought. Ceramics, fabrics, papers, and words intertwine in works that seek to save what time threatens to erase: everyday gestures, the marks of presence, the traces of things, the memories of a life. The pieces do not arise from urgency, but from a prolonged coexistence and dialogue with the materials. Repetition gives rhythm to this making-thinking, in poetic processes that are reflective and at the same time meditative.’
